Even in his earliest poetry, Ezra Pound was extremely interested with poetic technique, particularly with musicality and rhythm. The musicality of poetry is in fact the aspect he best understood. So when he turned to composition later on, he discovered in music another medium through which to explore and discourse upon that almost subliminal aspect of the mechanics of poetry. Al poco giorno, based on a sestina by Dante Alighieri, then, cannot be described as a "setting" because it is not one. It is a translation (or trans-substantiation) into music of the word rhythms of the poem. As he had with previous compositions, Pound "listened" to the micro word rhythms and transcribed what he heard there as best he could into melody. All that remains of the source poem for the innocent listener is its title. For Pound, though, the process of learning to carry out this difficult process was an aspect of his never-ending education. It must have revealed to him a lot about the inexorable relationship of the two arts and a lot about the subtleties of Alighieri's verse craft that can faintly be gleaned from the resulting music. Al poco giorno, one of his last compositions, is the best of the instrumental translation/transcription pieces. It's unfortunate he didn't continue the musical line of inquiry longer, for here he seems to finally be merging, in a studied way, his word-based technique with a grasp of idiomatically musical and instrumental expression. (The effectiveness of some of the other works seems mostly accidental.) He boldly uses a much wider range of the violin than before, with an obvious understanding of the dramatic effects possible with register changes, and he fills his fluid, rhapsodic work with devices such as double-stops that further show a concentrated focus on the violin itself as his medium. More than that, in Al poco giorno he is quite often, as never before, in control of the projected mood. For once it's actually easy to hear the music as a commentary on the poem it's derived from.

© All Music Guide